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A Treatise on Galileian Mechanics: Exercitationes in Mechanicis Aristotelis by the Jesuit Giovan Battista Zupi

2018; Springer Nature; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-90345-3_8

2214-7942

Romano Gatto,

Historical Studies in Science

This chapter will describe and comment a treatise on Galileian Mechanics, Exercitationes in Mechanicis Aristotelis by the Jesuit scholar Giovan Battista Zupi, revealing the sources from which the author derived his text. The treatise presents the course of lessons on mechanics that Zupi gave when he first began to teach at the Neapolitan Jesuit College. Although the ideas exposed in this work were not generally original, because the lessons are skillfully compiled using works on mechanics by followers of Archimedes, such as Bernardino Baldi and above all Galileo Galilei, it is interesting to scholars in the history of science for at least three reasons: 1) The lessons result from a skilled compilation, demonstrating Zupi’s wide knowledge of mechanics, including the latest works circulating at that time. He was able to put together and harmonize chapters from the most meaningful works by different authors, thus creating an organic essay containing all the subjects concerning a modern theory of the simple machines. 2. The text is eloquent proof of the contradictions that characterized many aspects of Jesuit educational politics in the scientific field. 3) The treatise is an important documentation of the diffusion within Jesuit schools of the mechanical theories that Galileo exposed in his Le Mecaniche, a work he did not publish during his lifetime but that circulated at the time among the scholars featured in manuscript. This diffusion, in the case of the Neapolitan College, assumes the form of a popularization of Galilean ideas on mechanics since, at that time, the Jesuits had an almost complete monopoly on education in Naples.